Everything in Its Right Place

after the tour

By the end of the OK Computer tour Thom Yorke had nothing left. He could not write, he had gone off rock music altogether, and the records he played at home came from Warp, Aphex Twin and Autechre among them.

It was refreshing because the music was all structures and had no human voices in it. But I felt just as emotional about it as I'd ever felt about guitar music.

thom yorke · the guardian, 22 september 2000

He bought a house in Cornwall and spent the days walking the cliffs, drawing, and sitting at a new grand piano. He called himself a “shit piano player”, and took comfort from Tom Waits, who reckoned not knowing an instrument was a source of ideas in itself. This was the first song that came, before “Pyramid Song”, and he played the melody over and over, trying to meditate his way out of the depression.

That's one of the reasons I wanted to get into computers and synths, because I didn't understand how the fuck they worked. I had no idea what ADSR meant.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 14 december 2000

sucking a lemon

Yorke has always said the words are not nonsense. They go back to the OK Computer tour, and to one night in particular at the NEC in Birmingham in 1997, when he came off stage, sat down in the dressing room and found he could not answer anyone.

I knew people were speaking to me. But I couldn't hear them.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 2 august 2001

The song, he said later, is about “trying to fit into the right place and the right box so you can connect”. The lemon is the face he says he wore for three years. He nearly cut the line, and it was Nigel Godrich who talked him into keeping it.

piano to prophet-5

Godrich was not sold on it at first, and the band got nowhere with it in Copenhagen or Paris, where they tried it as an ordinary five-piece arrangement. It came right in Gloucestershire. Yorke and Godrich moved it off the piano and onto a Prophet-5, and Godrich fed the vocal into Pro Tools, scrubbing and re-triggering fragments of it, so the voice that answers Yorke is Yorke.

We knew it had to be the first song, and everything just followed after it.

jonny greenwood · morning becomes eclectic, 20 october 2000

For Jonny it was the first time they had trusted a good song enough to leave it bare, instead of burying it in case it was not good enough. Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway had nothing to play on it at all, and said it taught them that not every song needs all five of them.

It opens Kid A. A live version opened I Might Be Wrong the year after, and in 2012 Steve Reich took it apart and rebuilt it in Radio Rewrite.

the sampler at the end

Jonny was sampling Yorke's voice from the very first night, in Arles on 13 June 2000, catching phrases live and playing them back over and over. By Nijmegen that September it was closing the main set, and the band left the stage around it. Yorke walked off while his voice kept circling the tent, the others followed one at a time, and Jonny went last, still working the sampler.

From the 2003 tour on it was the song they ended with, and the archive has it closing ninety-four shows, more than any other song. The 2006 tour turned it round for a few nights and opened with it in Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Blackpool.

At the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in August 2016 the sampler was still repeating Yorke's words when he came back to the microphone for the next song, and he laughed out loud.